Latest news with #LegionofHonor
CBS News
a day ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Legion of Honor, de Young will have dozens of floral displays from June 3-8
Bouquets to Art returns to San Francisco de Young and Legion of Honor Bouquets to Art returns to San Francisco de Young and Legion of Honor Bouquets to Art returns to San Francisco de Young and Legion of Honor Monday was the beginning of the 41st annual Bouquets to Art at the San Francisco de Young and Legion of Honor museums. For the week-long event, designers have created huge floral displays as botanical interpretations of the museums' artworks and architecture. "You can see we have a whole inferno behind us, so many flames on this gallery. And that is actually the inspiration," lead designer Raul Dueñas said. Raul Dueñas designed a floral display for the 41st Bouquets to Art at the Legion of Honor. CBS News Bay Area Dueñas created one of the biggest installations and said it was made with "thousands and thousands" of flowers. The 41st Bouquets to Art will run from June 3 to June 8 at both the de Young and Legion of Honor, with dozens of floral installations on display. An opening night reception was held from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Monday. Proceeds from a raffle fundraiser will help support the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
San Francisco Chronicle
4 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Burglary at S.F. Conservatory of Flowers linked to homeless encampment
National Park Service rangers just helped solve the mystery of a safe that disappeared from the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers and was recovered from a homeless encampment near the Legion of Honor in the Presidio. At around 9:30 a.m. on May 22, a conservatory worker found a window broken in the whitewashed Victorian greenhouse. The employee soon discovered that the conservatory's safe, which had contained cash, and some other items were missing, said SFPD Public Information Officer Paulina Henderson, in an email. Henderson did not say how much money was missing. About half an hour later, police officers arrived at the scene. As they were investigating the reported burglary, SFPD got a call from the National Park Service, Henderson said. That same morning, five rangers from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area had responded to a complaint of a homeless encampment between the Legion of Honor and the nearby Coastal Trail in the Presidio and found three individuals surrounded by what appeared to be stolen goods, said Chad Marin, chief ranger at GGNRA. Though his team is part of federal law enforcement, 'The evidence that the rangers walked into was beyond the scope of the National Park Service,' Marin said, so they contacted police. After getting the tip, the police made their way to the Presidio, found goods matching the description of what had been taken from the Conservatory and returned them, Henderson said. The police arrested and booked the three individuals: 53-year-old Brett McCready of San Francisco, 32-year-old Sierra Quinn, and 33-year-old Angel Grant-Raines into San Francisco County jail for the possession of stolen goods and conspiracy. McCready received an additional charge for possessing burglary tools, and Grant-Raines had an active and outstanding warrant for burglary in San Francisco. SFPD asks anyone with information to contact them at (415) 575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with SFPD. Henderson thanked U.S. rangers for their assistance, and Marin said he was proud of the collaboration, which also involved rangers from San Francisco Recreation and Parks. 'Ultimately three people are in custody because of the cooperative nature of our work,' he said.
LeMonde
6 days ago
- Politics
- LeMonde
Macron decorates Indonesian leader with France's highest honor
French President Emmanuel Macron bestowed Indonesia's leader with France's top award during a visit to a military base on Thursday, May 29, before a trip to the world's largest Buddhist temple. After meeting for talks in the capital Jakarta, Macron and his counterpart Prabowo Subianto flew by helicopter on Thursday to a military academy in Magelang, a city in Central Java surrounded by mountains. The pair attended a military parade and Macron gave Prabowo the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, France's highest military or civil award. Macron and Prabowo rode in a jeep with the pair welcomed by a marching band and hundreds of students waving Indonesian flags. Prabowo is an ex-general accused of rights abuses under dictator Suharto's rule in the late 1990s. He was discharged from the military over his role in the abductions of democracy activists but denied the allegations and was never charged. On Wednesday, Macron and Prabowo called for progress on "mutual recognition" between Israel and the Palestinians at a key meeting next month as Macron brought the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation into his diplomatic efforts. "Indonesia has stated that once Israel recognizes Palestine, Indonesia is ready to recognize Israel and open the diplomatic relationship," said Prabowo. Indonesia has no formal ties with Israel and support for the Palestinian cause among Indonesians runs high. The nations also signed a series of agreements on cooperation in a range of fields including defence, trade, agriculture, disaster management, culture and transport. Macron's visit to Indonesia is the second stop of a three-nation, six-day tour of Southeast Asia that began with Vietnam and concludes in Singapore. Macron will deliver the opening address Friday at the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore, Asia's premier security forum.
Boston Globe
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Marthe Cohn, a Jewish spy in Nazi Germany, dies at 105
Her spying earned her France's Croix de Guerre and was credited with saving the lives of Allied troops pressing in on the Reich. And more than 50 years later, after French officials took a fresh look at her military record, she was awarded another prestigious award, the Médaille Militaire, and was named a knight in the Legion of Honor, the country's highest order of merit. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up By then, Ms. Cohn had only just begun to discuss her brief career as a spy. Her husband, an American, had learned about her espionage exploits only after they were married. For years, even her children had no idea that Ms. Cohn — a petite but energetic woman who stood no more than 4-foot-11 — once crawled across the border on her hands and knees, hiding from German sentries while bringing intelligence back to the French. Advertisement 'I just thought nobody would believe me,' she told the Los Angeles Times in 2005, explaining her years of silence. 'Spies are usually tall and good-looking. I am a very unlikely spy.' Ms. Cohn, who died May 20 at the age of 105, spent the past quarter-century sharing her story at schools and community centers across Europe and the United States, where she worked as a nurse after the war. In her final years, she served as a memory keeper for the Holocaust and the French resistance, sharing her story in a well-received 2002 memoir, 'Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany,' and in a 2019 documentary, 'Chichinette: The Accidental Spy.' 'I will bear witness,' she often told audiences, 'until my last breath.' The fourth of seven children, she was born Marthe Hoffnung in Metz on April 13, 1920. Her family was Orthodox — her maternal grandfather was a rabbi — and her parents ran a small business framing and enlarging photos. As a teenager, Ms. Cohn occasionally got into fistfights at school, brawling with Catholic classmates who made antisemitic comments about Prime Minister Léon Blum, who was Jewish. She said she inherited some of her scrappiness from her father, who once removed his belt and went after teenagers who were throwing stones at the family as they left the local synagogue. Advertisement After Kristallnacht, the Nazis' 1938 pogrom against Jews, Ms. Cohn's parents began taking in Jewish refugees from Germany, looking after penniless families that needed a place to stay for a few days as they sought a new home in France or elsewhere. Ms. Cohn recalled in her memoir that while she was horrified by the pogrom, 'never for one moment did I think that the same thing would happen to us. Not in France. … I believed in human nature. I still had confidence that good would prevail.' When World War II broke out in 1939, the family moved across the country to Poitiers, far from the German border. They remained there during the 1940 invasion and subsequent occupation, living for a time under few restrictions. Ms. Cohn said that she even worked at city hall with German officials who, admiring her accent and skill with the language, invited her to move to Germany for work, not realizing she was Jewish. Gradually, the situation deteriorated. Nazi leaders closed Jewish businesses and mandated that residents wear a yellow star in public. Ms. Cohn was approached on the street one day by one of her colleagues from city hall, who offered to provide her and her family with identity papers that were not stamped with the word 'Jew.' The documents would let them travel freely to unoccupied France. 'When I asked him how much it would cost, he started crying and he said, 'I do not want to be paid. I do this to save you,'' she recalled in an interview with the Jewish Ledger, a Connecticut newspaper. 'He gave me all the identity cards.' Ms. Cohn's sister Stéphanie was arrested before the family could leave. But Ms. Cohn, her parents and several of her siblings were able to flee and survive, with help at times from one of Ms. Cohn's brothers who worked in the resistance. She spent part of the war in Marseille, studying to become a nurse, and enlisted in the French army in 1944 after the liberation of Paris. Advertisement 'At first,' she recalled, 'they looked at my size and said, 'Little girl, go back to your mother. You don't belong in the army.'' Ms. Cohn proved persistent — 'I'm going to stay,' she said she told the officers — and was allowed to enlist as an aid worker, tasked with visiting soldiers near the front and asking what they needed. At one point, she was assigned to answer calls for a colonel who needed to step out for lunch. He apologized, telling Ms. Cohn that she would have nothing to read to pass the time, as he only had German-language books in his office. 'I said, 'That's OK, I can read German,'' she told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. 'It's as simple as that, how your life can change.' The army was looking for German-language speakers who could work as spies. Ms. Cohn underwent a brief training — she was so inquisitive, she said, that her colleagues nicknamed her Chichinette, French for 'little pain in the neck' — and was sent to Switzerland, where she tried more than a dozen times to cross the border into Germany. She eventually succeeded, crossing a field without being spotted, carrying only a small suitcase and a picture of a German prisoner of war whom she claimed was her fiancé. Advertisement Ms. Cohn used the photo to win the trust of German soldiers, asking whether they had seen her lover on the battlefield. During one encounter, she claimed to be terrified about the prospect of an Allied invasion. 'They told me not to worry,' she said in the Times interview. 'And then they told me in precisely which section of the Black Forest the German army was waiting for the Allies.' Ms. Cohn hurried back to the border to share her discovery with the French. She also revealed that German troops near Freiburg were withdrawing from the Siegfried Line, a long-fortified defensive position. After the war ended, she served as an army nurse in Vietnam, then part of French Indochina. She also continued her nursing studies in Geneva, where she met Major L. Cohn, an American medical student who had served on a Navy minesweeper during World War II. They married in 1958, moved to the United States and later worked together in Los Angeles, her husband as an anesthesiologist and Ms. Cohn as a nurse. Her husband, who survives her, said Ms. Cohn died at home in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. He did not cite a specific cause. Survivors also include their two sons, Stephan and Remi Cohn, and a granddaughter. In her public appearances, Ms. Cohn sought to draw lessons from the Holocaust, urging audiences to have sympathy for migrants who — like many Europeans Jews in the 1930s and '40s — struggle to find refuge in the United States and other countries. Asked in the documentary what message she had for people today, she replied, 'Be engaged. And don't accept any order that your conscience could not approve.' Advertisement
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
102-year-old WWII vet honored at Oklahoma State Capitol
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — He served his country with honor during WWII and now 102-year-old R.D. Lawrence, a former prisoner of war, has been honored with a medal that few Oklahomans ever get when he received the Oklahoma Cross of Valor Monday morning. 'When you get as old as I am, these things don't come easy,' Lawrence said laughing. RELATED STORY: How this Wakita, OK farmer earned France's Legion of Honor medal At 102 years young, however, Lawrence makes ordinary life look easy. The well deserved recognition for the Wakita native at the state capitol came in front of friends, family, including his three kids, and more when he received his medal. 'I didn't know my kids had that many friends,' he said. 'They all showed up.' In 2021, KFOR's Galen Culver highlighted Lawrence's time in the military after he received France's Legion of Honor medal. 'First to Africa then to Italy, Lawrence and his crew flew 37 bombing missions over Europe all with him in his unique vantage point,' Culver said at the time. 'I seen it all. We was lucky,' Lawrence said in 2021. Lawrence flew in the ball turret position in a B-17 flying fortress. He and his crew were shot down over Hungary on his 37th mission. All 10 of them survived the crash, but Lawrence was captured. As the tide of the war turned and the German's retreated, Lawrence was forced to march more than 500 miles between POW camps. Almost 80 years to the day he was liberated in May 1945, he's still going strong. It was a proud moment for his children. LOCAL NEWS: Oklahoma Company helps OKCPS Foundation support local students 'We're very grateful,' Lawrence's daughter Julie Gariss said standing next to her siblings, Leanna Turney and Dick Lawrence. 'I don't know that he thinks he deserves it, but he does it for everybody else that lost their lives.' 'He's my hero,' Turney said. No doubt, he's a hero to many more as well. 'This has been good and it hasn't been bad,' Lawrence said. The last time that medal was handed out was 1998. Lawrence is the last surviving member of his B-17 crew. He now lives and still does some work on his family's Wakita farm. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
